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André Freire, "Party
Polarization and Citizens' Left-Right Orientations,"
Party Politics, 14 (March, 2008), 189-209.
First paragraph:
Since the French Revolution, the notion of a left-right
divide has gained importance in modern mass politics. In the
early 1980s, Laponce (1981: 56) viewed the idea as a type of
'political Esperanto', and since then the left- right
political cleavage has functioned as: a schema classifying
ideologies, i.e. as a device by which parties' and
candidates' political orientations and policy proposals are
categorized; a communication code between politicians, the
mass media and citizens; and an instrument helping electors
cope with the complexities of the political universe and
arrive at political decisions. There is considerable
evidence to suggest that there is little empirical support
for the 'end of ideology' thesis, and, particularly at the
individual level, that the left-right divide is still a very
important information-economizing device enabling electors
to cope with political complexities, at least in Western
Europe (Franklin et al., 1992; Freire, 2006a, b; Gunther and
Montero, 2001)
- Figures and
Tables:
- Table 1. Explaining left-right self-placement in 1990
(I) (OLS regressions)
- Table 2. Explaining left-right self-placement in 1990
(II) (OLS regressions)
- Table 3. Explaining left-right self-placement in 1999
(I) (OLS regressions)
- Table 4. Explaining left-right self-placement in 1999
(II) (OLS regressions)
- Table 5. Party polarization and citizens' left-right
orientations, 1990
- Table 6. Party polarization and citizens' left-right
orientations, 1999
- Appendix: Operational Definition of Concepts
Used
Next to Last
paragraph:
In explaining the differences between countries, two main
conclusions can be derived from our analysis. First,
although in the new south European democracies citizens
exhibit lower levels of recognition of the left-right scale
(1976-2002), vis-à-vis the older democracies in
Western Europe, in terms of the levels of social, value and
partisan anchoring of individuals' left-right attitudes
there are no systematic differences between old and new
democracies. Second, our data reveal that what best explains
countries' variations in left-right total anchoring is
ideological polarization at the party system level, and that
these effects are quite strong. Moreover, these results are
fairly robust because they were arrived at both by aggregate
data analysis (Freire, 2006a), plus alternative measures of
party polarization, and by a multi-level approach (present
article), but future research should expand the set of
countries under analysis. The multi-level approach revealed
that the factors that interact more clearly with party
polarization are socio-economic values and party loyalties.
As already mentioned, previous studies attempting to explain
countries' differences in the level of anchoring in
citizens' left-right attitudes used only aggregate data
analysis, and only one of them (Freire, 2006a) considered
party polarization as an explanatory factor
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